Thoughts and Comments on oliSUNvia's Videos

Warning to woke people: please turn away unless you're ready to be offended. :)

Her video was on my YouTube feed and I ended up watching for 2 hours straight and missed 1 meeting.

Yeah she's good and she reminds me of someone who's very intelligent.

The videos below are sorted by the order I watched them - this you you can see my journey when watching her videos.

The channel: https://www.youtube.com/@oliSUNvia/videos

Videos

the self-fetishization of east-asia: koreaboos & weebs aren't the only problem

the thumbnail and the title instantly captured my attention as I've taken time to research all the keywords in the title before, except the "self-" part of "self-fetishization".

The YouTuber, or the "video essayist" as she called herself in one of her videos below, is a Chinese Canadian, probably 2nd generation, and spreaks Mandarin without an English accent despite claiming speaking it bad, and is a philosophy student at U of Toronto.

She supports her arguments with reference to papers.

In this video she discussed how some people are connected to "their culture" via physical traits, rather than the culture itself.

She also talked about the Japanese anime - I don't watch them, but so many people from outside (and inside) of east asia are obsessed with those anime and the fantasy of Japan, and she pointed out that as a way to push their culture, the J anime is actually de-japanized (such as characters having red eyes), and the creators knew that.

Japan in their mind is just a copy, or a copy of a copy, it's a fantasy and not real.

I feel dumb as I'm writing this - it's hard to explain the video and you should watch it if you're interested in the topic.

AI's summary of what's self fetishization? what did she say about it?

our conception of love is messed up.

my take away is that love is more about the action from my part, than my feelings. I like it that she addresses certain unhealthy (or fucked up) expectations from some women.

she also talks about her (or our) fear of "not being loved".

everything wrong w/ "romanticize your life": eurocentrism, hedonism, unrealistic, etc.

when you think of a fancy breakfast, or a romanticized one, you think of coffee and croissants, not porridge.

even if she prefers porridge over french toast, she thinks of the latter as a romanticized breakfast. and that's very problematic.

she aknowledged that european origin of "romanticism", but I think people should be aware of how the society, or the information we ingest shape how we think. it can be hard to shake "first impression", but you should at least be aware of it.

she also talks about that it's bad to romanticizing "slow things down and get a croissant from that fancy store, or take time to yoga".

it's ok to eat in a rush. it's ok to not know about what yoga or pilate is. that doesn't mean your life is lame.

personally I want to give 100% to things with high ROI / return on time / return on effort. Eating breakfast that way is certainly not a high ROI activity.

after watching this I feel better when I fail to appreciate my cooking when eating breakfast in a rush. :)

the faux freckle filter: everyone's latest aspiration... & insecurity

god snapchat is the worst american app that americans like to use. it's god awful. I hated that $SNAP shot up after earnings, and I had to spent 15 minutes to leg out of my time spread individually because I forgot to set a GTC limit order to sell it.

talking about the word faux again! here's a link to some examples when I learned the word: TCWOTD: faux

in the video she compared camera filters that update in real time to makeup. she thinks that people thinking that the filters give achievable results without the time, money and effort to put on makeups, but that's just not true. it's fake, the filter is "permanent", your lipstick doesn't wear off, you look the same even when you're crying.

what can you ACTUALLY learn from video essays??

the first time I hear about the phrase "video essay" was when I was applying for grad school (CMU to be specific, they require this thing while other schools do not).

so from this video I learned that what she does it called "video essay" - it's for the broad audience, because reading paper is pain and most people don't know about sci-hub and can't access papers for free.

her audience has a very balanced gender ratio at 1:1. impressive. I thought most are male.

DEPOP mystery style bundle review & try-on (i ACTUALLY LIKE IT this time)

idk what depop is, but I've watched other "I ordered a surpised bag of clothes and now let me show you when I try them on" videos, and this is kinda like that, but female version.

I gotta say those look really nice on her. she talked about the price and fees, and I know she hated it when she has to pay CAD with a higher number lol.

off-topic for this blogpost, but fun fact - CAD/USD is a proxy for oil price, and I have a note about this on my Microfeed.

I was also thinking about topic "your relationship with money" that came up in a live trader's chat. I've been thinking about it a lot. What does $100 mean for you? Obviously this has a lot to do with how easy you can make $100.

She complained about the shipping fee of $15 US dollars. I was thinking - yeah that wasn't very cheap. I also thought about the atrocious Schwab's futures commission, costing me \$2.25 + \$.37 for one side of a micro contract, and I paid 4 times that for my 2 /MES trades today. I traded illiquid tickers like AMDL to speculate on AMD's sell off on news event, and the wide spread I had to cross costed me like $100 each. Made a small profit after all, but it sucked. I was doing a debit put spread on AMDL, while the couragous people are buying straight ATM puts on AMD. They were properly rewarded for the risks they took.

I ordered clothes online for the first time after moving to the US. I remember how excited I was when unboxing boxes after boxes and trying them on, and the frustration with the chinos that were too wide, too tight, or the suffucating feeling when I buttoned up the top button of my shirt. 1 shirt maker's 15 inch neck size is 16 inch for another. To this day I only know for sure my neck size with Brook's Brothers' shirts.

most americans are just so fat (you can replace the word to overweight or horizontally challenged if you have trouble processing the word; thanks to the cities built for cars and you don't need to move your fat ass) and the US dress shirts for men have a higher neck size to sleeve length ratio, many non-custom-made shirts just look off on people with a healthy BMI.

I feel for americans that work their ass off to pay for the $$$ diabetes drugs from big pharmas.

Q&A from that one video essay girl | 500k subs

she did live make up in this video - see the video discussing the political meaning of makeup below.

she seems to be very good at it.

this is my first time seeing $ELF's products

https://youtu.be/o3dYr1ojXwo?&t=242 - how she drew the eye liners - it was crazier than I thought. It did make her eyes look wider. :)

after the makeup she started answering philosophy questions ;/ and random life questions :)

is the K in K-pop is losing meaning? (bts, blackpink, wayv, exp)

I've never listened to kpop songs. I do know bts has english songs, and I watched Vogue's videos of blackpink's rose on YouTube due to algo.

didn't know that none of blackpink members were born in korea before!

my take away is that K just means the way they were trained and managed, the performers don't need to be korean.

makeup is oppressive...but also empowering? | philosophy of beauty & self-expression

oh so many questions about makeup have been bothering me for a long time -

• for one, i hate that in some culture women are expected to wear makeup when going out, even if it's just to fetch a package (Korea).
• i also hate it when the wearer's intention is to deceive (making people think they)
• i prefer girls without makeup and I want people to normalize people with or without makeup from either gender and not expecting them to be in a certain way.

https://youtu.be/M3KzdrnUAB8?t=2366

2366s is the start of the section "personal is political". olivia has monolids but wears makeup that hides that fact - she said that she cannot do without without signifying european beauty standards. But if she doesn't do this, it sucks "not to be able to conform to those standards".

the takeaway is to be emphathetic about each other's choices since there are so many Oppresive Strucutures around us.

and the choices are not black and white, there's a degree, a spectrum.

homo sacer - life that can be killed without consequences

what i learned:

• example: those who were exiled at ancient time can be killed if they came back, without consequences
• the jews were homo sacer to the nazi germany. when they ran out of people to kill, they made more people homo sacer, and started killing germans.
• totalitarian regimes have a tendency to do the above
• us and canada spent billions in an attempt to rescue that imploded titantic sub, and coast guard claims they will alays answer calls for help. but those were billionaires on the sub. olivia said that the non-american citizens trying to cross the border via water wouldn't get the same treatment from coast guards, in fact, they may not help them at all - those people became homo sacer.

the pursuit & appeal of (MUCH) older men

investment model, gender norms

great opening and analysis

is it an outfit or is he just a man? - fashion standards for both genders

for men, they don't want to be "too much", they want to be well-put-together in a casual way, and that's considered well-dressed

olivia tried on outfits from pinterest's men's fashion section and felt underdressed, supporting her opinion that the standards are very different for both genders.

one thing I don't agree with is that men can just have one suit and wear it to any events - well that's definitely not true. I can pick up small differences between menswear and many things make huge difference in train eyes.

I remember someone on hackernews said the tux is the most formal dress, which is also not true. I respect HN users' technical competency, but they really need to educate themselves on areas that are stereotypically not a concern for tech workers, like fashion.

i had a ben shapiro/jordan peterson phase... and i'm glad i did

wow. very interesting. I saw this video on my recommendation list for many times but didn't clicked on it because it has "ben shapiro" in the title.

I like this video because she's very honest about how her beliefs have changed over time, and topics like open-mindedness are quite insightful.

she talked about how they have political discussions in "university" - I wish I had that chance.

many years ago I was watching PragerU videos on YouTube, those videos are about Israel, genders, etc, and why their side is better.

some of the videos I watched and remember are:

• why it should be acceptable to say "merry christmas" instead of "happy holidays"
• why israel good
• men are visual animals, that's just how we are, and that justifies some of the bad things some men do (no, I do not agree with this)

well - i stopped watching after a few days. I do not like being told what to think. at all. and the agenda is too obvious.

I have a friend who's very right-leaning and he told me about ben shapiro. Never liked him. Spend 5 min watching his video max. TIL he's funded by oil companies. I never heard of jordan peterson before this video above.

growing up in totalitarian regime, I learned to question things "people" want me to think - lol I'm not gonna believe you just because you have those stats and facts - like olivia said, how do I know you picked a representative number in your argument?

in the meantime, I found many people growing up in the west, north america specifically, to be extremely ignorant. talking about "capitalism", "the system", and making comments on the "environment" or "communism" - and it seems to me like they do not know what those words mean and they're just filler words to support their arguments and agenda.

"asian"s in america, whiteness, and how fucked up it is

I wish more people can watch this.

finding empathy for anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers

olivia is pro mask / vaccines but she's able to differentiate between the people who are anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, and looking at the matter from a different angle, which is admirable.

as a trader, I'm painfully aware of how my biases that I'm not aware can hurt me. Hope is not a strategy or an edge, and what I think where the market would go or how the price action would develop has no effect on the reality.

I must learn to be ready to invalidate my thesis and beliefs at any time, and form new thesis that may contradict my previous ones, and be ready to take losses sooner than later, if needed, to be better at this game.

the desire to be "sad", to be the victim, in an aesthetic way, to get attention

Misc

I can't believe this took me over 100 minutes to write (the first 5-ish review) - I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did watching her videos.

Comments for new videos are being added as I watch them.